The Creative Nonfiction Film Weekend is a three-day celebration of everything documentary can and should be, taking place at the Genesis Cinema in London. The festival aims to thrill, entertain, and provoke. Ultimately, it should bring a community of filmmakers and cinephiles together to forge a path toward a cinema that embraces and investigates the subjectivity of reality.
More additions to the programme are coming soon, including events surrounding the films that aim to bring attendees together in discussion and community.
As Mine Exactly
A mother and son revisit the medical emergency that reshaped their lives, and the remarkable fragments that remain of that time, in this intimate blend of virtual reality and performance film.
As Mine Exactly, by documentary filmmaker Charlie Shackleton, is a half-hour performance for an audience of one utilising VR technology.
Searchers
Post-screening discussion with director Pacho Velez
Searchers draws on over seventy-five encounters with New Yorkers of different races, genders, ages, social classes, and sexual preferences, as they navigate their preferred dating apps, searching for their special someone. The film unfolds online; the characters, including the director himself, wade through apps, using their instincts and experience to decode dating profiles while narrating their decision-making process.
Alternately humorous and touching, these portraits capture the variety of sexual and romantic experiences available online, as well as the diverse community of people seeking them out.
Cette Maison
Bridgeport, January 2008. A teenage girl is found hanged in her room. While everything points to suicide, the autopsy report reveals something else. Ten years later, the director and cousin of the teenager examine the past causes and future consequences of this unsolved crime. Like an imagined biography, Cette Maison explores the relationship between the security of the living space and the violence that can jeopardize it.
I Didn't See You There
As a visibly disabled person, filmmaker Reid Davenport sets out to make a film about how he sees the world, from either his wheelchair or his two feet, without having to be seen himself. The unexpected arrival of a circus tent outside his apartment in Oakland, CA leads him to consider the history and legacy of P.T. Barnum’s Freak Show and its lingering presence in his daily life in the form of gawking, lack of access, and other forms of ableism.
Informed by his position in space, lower to the ground, Davenport captures indelible images, often abstracted into shapes and patterns separate from their meaning. But the circus tent looms in the background, and is reverberated by tangible on-screen interruptions, from unsolicited offers of help to careless blocking of ramps. Personal and unflinching, I Didn’t See You There forces the viewer to confront the spectacle and invisibility of disability.
Winner of the US Documentary Directing Award at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival
My First Film
Post-screening discussion with editor Joe Bini.
A young filmmaker, Vita, revisits her first chaotic attempt at filmmaking 15 years prior. Shooting a semi-autobiographical film starring her friend Dina, Vita’s eager but inexperienced approach causes the production to spiral into chaos, leading to significant disruptions and a near-fatal accident.
i hate myself :)
Nebbishy filmmaker Joanna Arnow documents her yearlong relationship with an open-mic poet provocateur. What starts out as an uncomfortably intimate portrait of a dysfunctional relationship and protracted mid-twenties adolescence, quickly turns into a complex commentary on societal repression, sexuality, and self-confrontation through art.
CW: Racism and racial slurs; hateful language directed at religious groups; graphic sexual content.
I See the Stars at Noon
Post-screening discussion with director Saeed Taji Farouky
In January of 2004, in the northern Moroccan city of Tangiers, first time documentary filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky met a 26-year-old Moroccan named Abdelfattah. He was a clandestine, one of many Africans who try to cross the narrow Straits of Gibraltar and illegally enter Spain by stowing away on cargo ships or boarding inflatable rafts.
I See The Stars At Noon offers a unique and revealing insight into Abdelfattah’s desperate attempt to reach Europe. At times humorous and disturbing, it intimately examines the circumstances that lead him to risk everything for an utterly uncertain future. But I See The Stars At Noon is not only a portrait of a hopeful immigrant; it is also an exploration of the nature of documentary filmmaking and objectivity. The traditional relationship between filmmaker and subject is thrown into question when Abdelfattah asks why his life is being filmed for the benefit of European audiences, and what he deserves in return. Such issues are rarely dealt with in documentary film, and by addressing them head-on, I See The Stars At Noon stands out as a highly original and deeply personal look at the dilemma of illegal immigrants.
Miguel's War
A portrait of a gay man who confronts the ghosts of his past. After fleeing war and repression 37 years ago, Miguel returns to Lebanon where he traces hidden longings, unrequited love and tormenting feelings of guilt.
Winner of the Teddy Award at the 2021 Berlin International Film Festival
A Still Small Voice
Post-screening discussion with producer Kellen Quinn
Director Luke Lorentzen’s A Still Small Voice follows Mati, a chaplain completing a year-long hospital residency, as she learns to provide spiritual care to people confronting profound life changes. Through Mati’s experiences with her patients, her struggle with professional burnout, and her own spiritual questioning, we gain new perspectives on how meaningful connection can be and how painful its absence is.
Winner of the US Documentary Directing Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature